


Fin de Vers

by Akallabeth



Series: Les Misérables Fix Fic Game [6]
Category: Les Misérables (TV 2018), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Romanticism, got all serious somehow, poets, presumptuous and gratuitous poetic quotations in English, was supposed to be crack, well the musical's "lesbian poet" and bbc's axe-wielding female extra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-25 13:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17725922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akallabeth/pseuds/Akallabeth
Summary: Two poets take their places at the barricades.





	Fin de Vers

Lemarck's funeral descends into riot, and that riot spreads through Paris. The populace runs wild, throwing up hasty barricades in the cross-streets, distributing cartridges to passersby, and ransacking shops and houses alike for arms.

In this chaotic fervor--called the 5th of June, 1832--two figures meet on the rue de la Verrerie.

Says the first to the second, "Where are you going, M. Dante?"

Says the second to the first, "Where are you leaving, Mlle. Sappho?"

"I am leaving a dark past and those who would not have my company", replies the one called Sappho. She, too, is a poet, and answers to that name as readily as any. Her work appears under many names; we note that some of her companions call her Lisette.

"I am going in search of a better future", says Jean Prouvaire, whose friends call him by his surname, and who signs his work 'Jehan'. "And seek congenial companions."

"You have found none?"

"The barricade where the Rue Mondetour meets the Rue de la Chanvrerie wants no Romantic dreamers", Prouvaire laments.

"And that at St. Merry, no women. I have heard nothing against Romantics, however."

"Then, I shall proceed to offer my arms to Jeanne", Prouvaire flourishes his carbine. "And I thank you, my good Virgil. If you've no objection to fighting alongside classicists, they are not yet turning women away at the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

" _We would not die in that man's company/That fears his fellowship to die with us._ " The other shrugs. Shifting her axe from one shoulder to the other, she asks "Not Beatrice?"

"No indeed", he observes sadly, "for this is not yet heaven. But come, my Virgil! Let this be purgatory to which you lead me."

"It is indeed", she laughs. Almost. "We have too much hope for the other place. _Some say a cavalry corps/some infantry, some, again,/will maintain that the swift oars/of our fleet are the finest/sight on dark earth; but I say/that whatever one loves, is._ "

"Then we can do naught but prevail", Prouvaire smiles. "Long live the future!"

"Long love the future."

And so saying, the friends continue on their separate ways.

**

The fighting is as bad as she remembers from '30. They had jested, then, of the Romantic Army which had begun with the liberation of the mind, and followed with the liberation of the body. They had lost loved ones, and continued to love; they had won the fight, only to lose again.

She exchanges nods with Matelotte, the long-suffering waitress whose path occasionally crosses her own. A deliberately nameless man in a cap appears--another acquaintance. He once admitted to painting fans, and she has called him Feuilly ever since. At one point, she thinks she sees the dramatist Dumas, but it turns out to be a different friend of a friend--a law student called Courfeyrac. 

He, apparently, knows the fellow who arrives late and drives off the national guard almost alone. There's something of Werther about the newcomer, and she wonders what Charlotte he flees to throw himself off a cliff of exploding powder.

The respite does not last. The student who has assumed command speaks of freedom, and of love. They build the barricade higher, and send away those friends who must live.

 _"If we are mark'd to die, we are enow_  
_To do our country loss; and if to live,_  
_The fewer men, the greater share of honour."_

She stays. Her axe is already bloodied. She has no children to consider. Alix will weep, but she will carry on. Feuilly will lead the next revolution, and perhaps that will be the one to succeed.

The end comes swift, and brutally. They fight with pistols against carbines, swords against bayonets... paving stones and bottles and broken pieces of furniture, and even bare fists.

Spectres battle demons, and Virgil fears she, indeed, has led her friend into hell rather than purgatory. Prouvaire is intrepid; he will not have left, either.

A final blow, the axe falls from her numb hand. What awaits in the next world, she knows not. But here, on the street bereft of cobblestones, where no flowers grow from the earth, she raises up her own from each blossom of pain:

 _"Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,_  
_Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,_  
_Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground."_

A kilometer away, another verse ends:  
_"Oh! what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly depths!"_

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be crackfic, in which the hidden badass at the BBC barricade picks up the axe of the best-named character in the musical, and assumes the powers of Lesbian Poet. Instead, it turns out they were the same person all along. Then Jehan showed up and things got serious. 
> 
> Quotations are from Shakespeare's Henry V (St. Crispin's Day speech), and from Sappho's "To an army wife, in Sardis", and "One Girl". Jehan's poem is from 4.12.6, Hapgood translation.
> 
> I have Courf as a law student here, because of the BBC's timeline seems to indicate that Marius is still a student (even though they both should have graduated before '32).


End file.
